by Melanie Rawn
“We’ll Ward the door,” he managed, peering at Mikel. “Go.”
Mikel went.
Granon Isidir was sprawled across a carpet. Mikel had no time for him, left him to Sirron and Ollia. He saw a wild crimson glow from his mother’s bedroom, and felt the backlash of power, and for the first time understood the “taste” of Malerrisi magic. And recognized it from the night of St. Maidil’s, when Lirenza Mettyn died in his arms.
22
CAILET gathered strength, knowing for a certainty that if her magic clashed with Jored’s, people would die. But Glenin was vulnerable; for some reason, she could not kill even though she desperately wanted to. So Cailet called on Tamos Wolvar’s consummate mastery of Mage Globes, and while maintaining the sphere that kept Jored’s at bay constructed another one to aim at Glenin.
Not to kill her. Only to enfold her as Josselin had mysteriously been enfolded, allowing no magic in or out.
Glenin conjured a small, compact Globe between her hands, ready to fling it at Sarra—unprotected while Taigan and Joss grappled with the sword. Within ruby depths something gold shimmered and trembled. When the sphere left her hands, Cailet wasn’t yet ready to counter it.
But it did nothing. It shot a few feet toward Sarra, then stopped like a ball slamming into a barn. Glenin tried again, again to no avail. A storm broke over her face, contorting beauty into feral rage. She turned—not toward Cailet, but toward the splintered windows. The old woman sat with her back to the stone wall, bleeding from cuts on her cheeks and hands. On her lips was a serene smile.
“I really can’t allow this, you know,” she said softly. “You can no longer kill, but you could do great damage.”
Glenin cursed savagely. “Let me go, you old witch!”
“Mage Guardians,” the Lady informed her, as if speaking to a dull-witted child, “do not obey Malerrisi.”
“Mage Guardians”—? was all Cailet had time to think before Glenin screamed at her son:
“Jored! Leave me! I command it!”
“No—Mother—”
He was Malerrisi, and yet he did not instantly obey. Cailet saw his anguish, felt him vacillate—watched his Mage Globe weaken and fade away. But before she could Work to hold him, he gave a terrible cry and fled.
And within the nullifying sphere the mysterious Lady had set around Glenin, the blood-red Globe with its quivering golden center exploded.
23
MIKEL grunted with the impact of colliding with Jored. He reeled, knocking over a chair. He had barely gained his balance, and Jored had barely raced past him, when he heard screams both from within his mother’s bedchamber and outside in the hallway. He staggered again, buffeted between two overwhelming gouts of magic. He righted himself and lurched toward the open door.
Sarra, the Captal, Taigan, Josselin, some silver-haired lady—all sprawled on the floor, stunned but still breathing. Glenin was a tangle of long limbs and turquoise silk and black lace and blood. Her arms had been blown away to the elbows.
Yet she lived. Mikel went to her, looked down into her face: scorched to blackness, crisped skin peeling from cheeks and brow, wounds oozing blood and clear yellowish fluid. He gagged, swallowed bile, and stepped back. His heel caught on something; he bent, picked it up, caught his breath as it singed his fingers, dropped it to the carpet. But he’d seen what it was. Twisted and bent, half-melted by the blast of magic, still he knew what the little piece of gold was. A coif pin. He’d last seen it yesterday, riding out on the hunt. He recognized it easily.
Not that Fa had ever worn it much.
Tears stung his eyes and he went to where his mother lay. Gathering her up, he placed her gently on the bed. She seemed at once older and younger than her forty-three years: fear aged her, drawing her face into lines of anguish, but with her golden hair tumbled around her cheeks she looked like a little girl. He knuckled his eyes and locked the sight of her in his heart, a memory to be taken out later, after grief turned her into an old woman once she learned that her husband was dead.
Taigan was stirring. Mikel got her into a chair, looking hard into her groggy eyes. “Teggie? Come on, Teggie, come back to me.”
She shook her head violently, moaned, and sat up straighter. “Mother—?”
“She’ll be all right. As soon as you can, help Joss.” He glanced down at his fellow Prentice, giving a start. “What happened to his hands? There’s blood all over them.”
Taigan pushed him away. “I’ll take care of him. You go to the Captal.”
He did, to find her huddled now on the carpet, the heels of her palms pressed tight to her head as if she would crush her skull between them. “Captal?” he said softly. Then: “Cailet?”
She looked up, black eyes tearing and bloodshot, her skin like bleached linen. “Glenin,” she said in a voice that shook with the pounding of her heartbeats.
“Dying, if not already dead.” He knew better than to ask what the hell had happened. She’d tell him when he needed to know.
“Help me.”
He half-carried her to where her eldest sister lay. Cailet knelt, one hand still rubbing at her temple, and with the other touched Glenin’s blood-smeared hair.
Lashless, blackened lids peeled back from gray-green eyes untouched by the explosion. Luminous, beautiful, they stared up at Cailet with loathing and triumph and hideous pain.
“My son lives,” Glenin whispered through seared lips.
“Yes,” Cailet said.
“He loved me best,” Glenin breathed, and Mikel thought she was talking about her son until she added, “He took me with him.”
“Yes.”
“But in the end. . . .” She coughed. Blood trickled from her mouth.
“In the end,” Cailet echoed steadily, “it was all for nothing.”
Glenin’s body stiffened. “What I did, I did to save a world.”
“To rule it. To remold it as you wanted it to be.”
“As it should be. As—” She whimpered low in her throat. “Oh, Weaver, it hurts—”
Cailet went on stroking her hair. “It’ll be over soon, Glensha.”
A spark lit her eyes. “Nobody’s called me that since—” Then her face drew taut with pride. “How dare you call me that.”
“You’re my sister.”
“As am I,” said another voice, strained and trembling. Mikel flinched at the sight of his mother. She knelt, placing a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “I’m here, Glensha.”
Glenin blinked charred eyelids to clear her vision of blood. “No one I want around me when I die.”
“Sisters who would have loved you,” Cailet said. “If you’d let us.”
“Loved me? For what?” Her lips stretched in a smile. “For killing Collan Rosvenir?”
Sarra recoiled with a little cry. Glenin’s arms moved, the stumps twitching grotesquely at her sides. Mikel knew what she wanted. He bent, picked up the sigil pin—cool now to the touch—and held it out to his mother.
That terrible smile still on her face, Glenin said, “My final secret. Remember, Mikel? Secrets must be used at just the right time—”
Sarra’s hand lashed out and knocked the sigil pin from Mikel’s fingers. “No! He’s not dead—he’s not—”
Taigan was there suddenly, arms around her mother, rocking her like a child as she cried. Taigan was crying, too. Sarra abruptly wrenched away from her, rasping out, “Don’t touch me! Just—don’t touch me!” But Taigan embraced her again and hung on tight, and Sarra slumped into her daughter’s arm.
Mikel fought his own tears, throat too tight for speech. Fa—no, not Fa— he repeated mindlessly, because seeing his mother’s and sister’s grief made the death real to him at last. Not Fa—please—
He looked at Cailet, whose hand had stilled on Glenin’s hair. The First Lady of Malerris had died with no one but the Mage Captal to notice her passing.
“Yes, Gorsha
,” he heard her whisper. “I know. Another minute.”
“Gorsha”? Mikel stared.
He had no time to puzzle it out. Footsteps made him look up in time to see Telomir, Ollia, Sirron, and Sevy come into the room. Ollia went to Joss, exclaimed over his hands, and ripped the sheets off the bed for bandages. Sirron swept up the sword that lay bloodied on the carpet and took up post at the door. Sevy stood gaping, not believing the evidence of his own eyes.
But Telomir, after one quick glance around, hurried to the shattered windows where the mysterious elderly woman still sat amid the rainbow of colored glass shards. “Mother! What the hell are you doing here? Are you all right?”
“Don’t fuss, dear,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
Cailet’s head snapped around. “You’re—”
“Jeymian Renne,” she said as her son assisted her to her feet and then to a velvet couch. “Forgive me for not introducing myself earlier. I wish there was time to get acquainted, but I’m afraid you must all get out of here as soon as possible.”
Mikel too felt the need of a chair. He locked his knees together so he wouldn’t fall over, and managed, “But where will we go? And what about everybody else?”
“Unless my son has completely lost the wits his father and I bestowed on him, all the Mage Guardians on Ryka are currently in this room.”
Cailet scowled at Sirron and Ollia. “I thought I ordered you—”
“Sorry, Captal,” said Granon Bekke’s nephew. “Elomar Adennos and the rest went to Ambrai—one step ahead of the Domburs and the Council Guard. Every Ladder in the Court is unavailable to us now.”
“There are alternatives,” Telomir said, then turned to his mother. “You’ll come with us, of course.”
“Saints, no, dear,” she said. “I’m still Lady Alinar Liwellan—who can delay them here while she gives some sort of suitably garbled account of this. I’m worth more to you in sheer confusion here than I ever could be running about Lenfell.”
“That’s all we can look forward to,” Mikel blurted. “Running. For the rest of our lives—until they catch up to us.”
“No,” Cailet said suddenly, but would not elaborate. She got to her feet, swaying slightly. “Lady Jeymian, I am deeply honored. Gorsha spea—spoke of you with high regard.”
“I’ll just bet he did,” she replied, eyes twinkling. “Help me up, Telo.”
He did, supporting her with an arm around her delicate waist as she walked to where Josselin sat, having his hands bandaged by Ollia. Jeymian looked down at the young man for a long moment; he returned her gaze with bewilderment. And Telo—his eyes went from his mother to the Prentice and back again before he bent his head to hide powerful emotion.
Caressing Josselin’s black curls, Jeymian Renne murmured, “I sought you twenty years ago, and finally found you—ah, such a journey for a woman nearly seventy years old, searching for a single tiny baby in all that madness in The Waste! But I did find you, and Ward you, and then lost you again until tonight.”
“Lady—” he began in a choked voice.
“Your great-grandfather was dead by then, or he would have done it. And your grandfather, not being a Listed Mage Guardian, had not the skills. He—”
Cailet interrupted as a clocktower rang Fourteenth. “Lady Jeymian, who is this man?”
“Great-grandson of myself and Gorynel Desse,” she said proudly, still gazing down into Joss’s moonstone-gray eyes. “Grandson of Telomir Renne and Mauren Trayos.”
Telomir could barely speak, but he supplied the rest. “Son of my daughter Sela Trayos and Verald Jescarin.”
24
CAILET turned away.
“Born the first day of Spring Moon,” Jeymian said, smiling at her great-grandson.
—whom Cailet had suspected of being the traitor at Mage Hall—Gentle St. Miryenne, a descendant of Gorynel Desse, traitor to the Mage Guardians!
“Just so you know,” Jeymian went on, “you are a Mikleine—your grandmother Mauren Trayos’s father was Gorsha’s dear friend Granon Mikleine. Her mother was Josea—which is where ‘Josselin’ comes from. I arranged for Mikleines to give you the Name. But the ‘Josselin’ is truly your own—your mother wrote it down before she died.”
—died giving birth too soon, because Cailet had tried to steal her child’s magic while he was yet unborn.
Gorsha—damn you, why didn’t you tell me?
You think I knew? It’s exactly as Jeymian says—I was dead before the boy was born, how could I know who he was when he showed up at Mage Hall?
But how did she know to go find him?
What Jeymian Renne doesn’t know isn’t worth the knowing.
That’s no answer!
Then ask her.
Joss rose unsteadily to his feet, towering over the frail old woman. Bending, he put his arms carefully around her. She held him, saying softly, “As tightly as you please, my dearest. Love won’t break these old bones.”
Telomir put a shaking hand on his grandson’s shoulder. The young man shifted, one arm reaching to enfold Telomir as well in his embrace.
Sirron Bekke cleared his throat. “Captal—”
“Yes. Of course.” Cailet glanced at Sarra, still weeping in Taigan’s arms. Collan—I knew something was wrong when he didn’t come back from the hunt—no matter what he learned from the courier, he would have sent word—oh, Saints, Savachel Maklyn must be dead, too—
“Captal, I think we’d better leave. Right now.”
Sirron’s right, said Gorsha. Just—just let me look at Jeymian once more, Cailet.
You loved her best of them all.
I adored her. Still do, he replied gruffly. Let me look at her again, and then let’s get the hell out of here.
Cailet said Taigan’s name. The girl—woman now, her face older than her years—looked up. “Take care of your mother,” Cailet said, and she nodded. Then, to Ollia: “You and Sirron get Granon Isidir—”
Sirron shook his head. “He’s dead, Captal. Broken neck.”
“Jored’s doing, on his way out.” Mikel came to her side. “He and Chava Allard must be long gone by now.”
“Not necessarily.” Telo moved away from his mother and grandson, wiping his eyes. From beneath his buttoned longvest he pulled a crumpled white cloth. This he spread onto the carpet—revealing gold and silver stitching on a three-foot-wide circle of velvet. “I relieved Allard of this before Jored shoved through and escaped with him.”
“That’s Glenin’s,” Cailet said. “What was Chava Allard doing with it?”
“Probably keeping it close to hand in case they had to escape quick. We can use it, you know. We’ve read their Code.”
“The Code of Malerris?” Jeymian Renne asked in astonishment. “You have a copy?”
“Back at Mage Hall—and ashes by now, Mother. But the Captal and I have read it, and what she doesn’t remember I probably do.”
“You really must write to me more often,” Jeymian scolded. Then, after a few more quiet words to Josselin, she walked unaided back to the windows, where she arranged herself on the floor as she had been. “Much as I’d love to become a Mage Guardian again, I’ll play my part of Lady Alinar and then return to the Cloister. Now, you’d better hurry, Cailet dear. Those Wards won’t last forever outside.”
“Become a Mage Guardian again?” Mikel echoed. “When we’re about to be hunted all over Lenfell?”
“Where will we go?” Taigan asked.
“Ambrai?” Telo suggested. “It’s where I sent the others.”
Cailet was about to say No, because by now there would be Malerrisi all over the city. But then she remembered a locked and Warded room at the Octagon Court, where only a few people ever went. “Ambrai,” she agreed.
Back to the beginning?
For a day or two. I have someplace else in mind as a final destination.
How final?
&n
bsp; Can I take a few years to think it over?
Mikel was eyeing the circle of embroidered white velvet. “That thing’s too small to take more than two people at once.”
“I’m a fair proficient at Ladders,” Ollia said. “Once the Captal shows me where we’re going, she and I can trade off taking the rest of you.”
Cailet nodded. Gathering Sarra from Taigan, she held tight to her only remaining sister and gave Gorsha his last look at Jeymian. The Lady was smiling at Cailet—who wished she could know who else she smiled at this one last time.
Cradling Sarra’s head to her shoulder, she took her own last look at Glenin. Her Wraith must be with Anniyas’s now, in the Dead White Forest. Why did it have to happen this way? Why couldn’t she—
—change? Gorsha asked sadly. You know why. Your father knew what we Mages were, and turned his back on us. Glenin never learned. She had nothing to turn toward. Consider her last act, her last words—gloating that she’d killed Collan, knowing it would break Sarra’s heart. Grieve if you must, Caisha, but for what was, not what could never have been.
And her son? Do I grieve for him, too, or hope that in his time with me he learned another way?
He paused a moment, then replied, Take a few years to think it over.
EPILOGUE
1
“HERE?!” Sarra stared at her sister, horrified out of her lethargy. “You’re crazy!”
“Why not here? It’s remote, uninhabited—”
“Uninhabitable!”
“Well, you’ve got me there,” Cailet replied cheerfully. “Scavengers have probably cleaned out everything. There won’t even be beds to sleep in.”
Taigan, studying the immense—and immensely ugly—structure of Scraller’s Fief, walked up a few of the three hundred and eighty-six steps. “We need a base. This will do.”
“It’s definitely defensible,” stated Ollia Bekke, who seemed to have taken Imilial Gorrst’s place if not yet her title as First Sword.
“And it’ll hold a lot of people,” Mikel added. “That’ll be a help in the future.”